What’s your favorite color? A simple question, sure — the very first one many of us learn to ask — but one to consider seriously if you see a future for yourself in filmmaking. Earlier this year, we featured video studies on the use of the color red by Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick. Yasujiro Ozu, as Jonathan Crow points out in that post, “made the jump to color movies very reluctantly late in his career and promptly became obsessed with the color red,” and a teakettle of that color even became his visual signature. No less an auteur than Krzysztof Kieślowski made not just a picture called Red, but another called Blue and another called White, which together form the acclaimed “Three Colors” trilogy.
Jean-Luc Godard, never one to be outdone, has also made vivid use throughout his career of not just red but white and blue as well. The video above, “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge — A Godard Supercut,” compiles three minutes of such colorful moments from the Godard filmography, drawing from his works A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, and Made in U.S.A., all of which did much to define 1960s world cinema, capturing with their vivid colors performances by Godardian icons Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina.
“Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” comes from Cinema Sem Lei, the source of another aesthetically driven video essay we’ve previously featured on how German Expressionism influenced Tim Burton. This one makes less of an argument than that one did, but truly obsessive cinephiles may still find themselves able to construct one. An obvious starting point: we consider few filmmakers as French as Godard, and which country’s flag has these very colors? Well, besides those of America, Australia, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, Iceland, North Korea, Luxembourg, Schleswig-Holstein, Thailand, and so on. And in interviews, Godard has distanced himself from pure Frenchness, preferring the designation “Franco-Swiss.” But still, you can start thinking there. Or you can just enjoy the images.
Would John Lennon’s “Imagine” have been such a big hit if it had come from an unknown singer/songwriter instead of one of the most famous rock stars in the world? Impossible to say. Maybe a better question is: could anyone else have written the song? “Imagine” has become much more than a soft rock anthem since its release in 1971; it has become a global phenomenon. Among the innumerable big events at which the humanist hymn appears we can include, since 2005, New York’s New Year’s Eve celebration and, just recently, a performance by pop star Shakira at the UN General Assembly just before Pope Francis’ historical appearance.
It seems an odd choice, given the song’s apparent anti-religious message. And yet, though Lennon was no fan of organized religion, he told Playboy magazine in a 1980 interview that the song was inspired by “the concept of positive prayer” in a Christian prayer book given to him by Dick Gregory. “If you can imagine a world at peace,” said Lennon, “with no denominations of religion—not without religion but without this my God-is-bigger-than-your-God-thing—then it can be true….” As if to underscore that particular point in his adaptation of “Imagine” in the video above, cartoonist Pablo Stanley includes such religiously diverse, yet ecumenical figures as the agnostic Albert Einstein, Protestant Martin Luther King, Jr., Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, and Rastafarian Bob Marley, along with less-famous freedom fighters like Harvey Milk and murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Stanley’s “Imagine” originally appeared in webcomic form, sans music, on his blog Stanleycolors.com. It seems that several people took exception to an earlier, mostly black-and-white draft (which also included what looks like the once-very-Southern-Baptist Jimmy Carter), so Stanley issued a multi-point disclaimer under his revised, full-color version. He states that this “is NOT an anti-religion/atheist propaganda comic”—charges also unfairly levied at Lennon’s song. Stanley doesn’t address the fact that most of the famous people in his comic, including Lennon, were assassinated, though this blog post offers a suggestive theory with interview footage from Lennon himself.
In every respect, the comic adaption of “Imagine” hews pretty closely to Lennon’s call for world peace. In another Beatles-penned ballad-adaptation, however, things take a much darker turn. Stanley uses his personal experience of near-suicidal depression in his comic realization of Paul McCartney’s song of lost love, “Yesterday.” (See a video version above, webcomic version here.) This is grim stuff, to be sure, but Stanley assures us that he “overcame that situation.” His commentary offers a hopeful take on the painful ending: “Looking at the yesterday reminds me that I should thrive for the tomorrow.” I’m sure McCartney would agree with the sentiment.
For many more smart, moving—though non-Beatles-related—comics from Pablo Stanley, see his blog, Stanley Colors.
Glasses were actually first invented, however, in Italy (some say Florence, to be precise) in 1286 or thereabouts. In a sermon from 1306, a Dominican friar wrote: “It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eyeglasses, which make for good vision… And it is so short a time that this new art, never before extant, was discovered.” In the mid 14th century, paintings started to appear with people wearing eyeglasses. (Take for example Tommaso da Modena’s 1352 portrait showing the cardinal Hugh de Provence reading.) A gallery of other historic eyewear can be viewed here.
In a quick six minutes, the animation above explains the origins of two very related problems — the Syrian Conflict & the European Refugee Crisis. How did the crisis first erupt? How did it lead to a refugee crisis? And why should we why put xenophobic fears aside and provide refugees with a safe haven in the West? All of these questions get addressed by “Kurzgesagt” (“in a nutshell” in German), whose timely animations you can find on Youtube (including a separate video on the rise of ISIS in Iraq).
Perhaps you’ve heard of a phenomenon called “podfade,” wherein a podcast — particularly an ambitious podcast — begins by putting out episodes regularly, then misses one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceasing to update entirely. It pleases us to report that The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the podcast offering just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you posted over the past three years, not only shows no signs of podfade, but has even broadened its mandate to include a greater variety of philosophical traditions than before.
For those who haven’t heard the show, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps comes from Peter Adamson, philosophy professor at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and King’s College London, and “looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.”
The main show has put out 379 episodes so far, beginning with the pre-Socratics (specifically Thales) and most recently examining Franciscan poverty, and now a new branch has grown, starting from Adamson and collaborator Jonardon Ganeri’s introduction to Indian Philosophy. (Hear the first episode of the Indian Philosophy series below.)
Episodes of this new series on the Indian tradition, Adamson writes, “will appear in alternating weeks with episodes on European philosophy.” He also mentions a “further ambition to cover the other philosophical traditions of Asia (especially Chinese) and also African philosophy and the philosophy of the African diaspora, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are waiting for me to get to that!”
You can subscribe to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps’ Indian philosophy series on its very own podcast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philosophically-minded binge-listeners beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. “I’ve been doing my laundry to it for months and I’m only up to Maimonides,” says one commenter on a Metafilter thread about the new series. “I am totally not ready for this Patañjali.”
She juggles multiple admirers, glows with self-satisfaction when her poem, “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt,” receives an A+, and cooly holds her ground against statuesque and seemingly better-heeled classmate, Jane.
It doesn’t matter that it’s never particularly clear what mystery this girl detective is solving… the Case of the Missing Tuition Check perhaps.
I love how she quotes from her own poetry with an intensity that should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever been called upon to read aloud from “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus” in an undergraduate Women’s Studies class.
(Speaking of Daddy, Plath’s gets a notable cameo. Shades of Hamlet’s father, but funny!)
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday
According to Rolling Stone, “The Vatican-approved LP … features the Pontiff delivering sacred hymns and excerpts of his most moving speeches in multiple languages paired with uplifting musical accompaniment ranging from pop-rock to Gregorian chant.” The Pope’s songs will focus on themes that Americans are getting familiar with this week: “peace, dignity, environmental concerns and helping those most in need.“Pope Francis: Wake Up! will officially go on sale on November 27th. Yup, Black Friday.
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There was once a time that I intended to make a career out of writing about and teaching the work of William Faulkner. Plans—and economies—change, but my admiration and enthusiasm for the U.S.‘s foremost modernist novelist has not dimmed one bit as time goes on. There’s something about the breathless urgency of Faulkner’s prose—combined with its thick haze of obscurity, seeming to represent the mists of time, and timelessness, itself—that never fails to entrance me. Despite his committed regionalism, Faulkner’s themes never slip from relevance, his archetypal characters rarely seem dated, and even his lesser works, like Sanctuary, reach sublime heights of tragicomedy few contemporary writers can scale.
Like all great writers, Faulkner had his flaws and blind spots. Many of his personal attitudes and writerly quirks might be called quaint or provincial. And yet, as Toni Morrison once told The Paris Review, incredibly dizzying novels like Absalom, Absalom! also reveal “the insanity of racism…. No one has done anything quite like that ever.” Whatever attitudes Faulkner inherited from his family and culture, he never sat comfortably with them as a writer, nor shrunk from interrogating the perverse contradictions of white supremacy and the pseudo-historical, fever-dream fantasies of the “The Lost Cause.” These themes have found resonance in nearly every cultural milieu. Faulkner’s “metaphysics” provoked Jean-Paul Sartre, and his very presence gave rise to an Oedipal struggle in writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez; he is read in Japan, Martinique, the Ivory Coast…. This is but a tiny sampling of the Mississippi novelist’s global reach.
Even before Faulkner was an academic industry or an Everest so many ambitious writers feel the need to conquer, he became a national treasure in his lifetime, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 and serving as an (often drunk) cultural ambassador for his country. In 1957, Faulkner began his year as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Though he joked at the time that he was “just the writer-in-residence, not the speaker-in-residence,” he nonetheless “gave two addresses, read a dozen times from eight of his works, and answered over 1400 questions from audiences made up of various groups, ranging from UVA students and faculty to interested local citizens.” A majority of these moments were captured on tape, and the UVA Library’s “Faulkner at Virginia” project has them all available online. You can search for specific references or browse the entire archive, and each page has a full transcript of the audio.
You can hear, for example, Faulkner instruct his audience on the correct pronunciation of “Yoknapatawpha,” the fictional county setting of his Mississippi fiction (top). You can hear him read his story “Shingles for the Lord” (middle), and hear (above) his humorous answer to a question about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (He confesses he hasn’t read it yet, then concludes, “I consider writing my hobby, not my trade. I’m a farmer, actually, and the people I know are not literary people, and I don’t keep up with [these] books.”) He gives many more lively answers about fellow writers and talks about his time in Hollywood (“It was a—a pleasant way to make some money.”)
Faulkner also touches on social issues, albeit reluctantly. In a tense moment during a session at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University (above), he gives an ambivalent response to a question about Brown vs. Board of Ed:
That’s sort of got out of fiction, hasn’t it? [audience laughter] I would say it was something that—that had to—to come. There was a—the dean of the law school at the University of Mississippi said ten, twelve years ago that in time the Supreme Court would—would hand down that opinion. Nobody believed him. It’s—it’s our fault. If we had—had given the Negro a chance to find whether or not he can be equal, there wouldn’t have been any need for it. It has set relations between the races back for some time, but it had to come. It’s our fault. [We could have prevented it.]
Like most of Faulkner’s responses to the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, this answer is halting and noncommittal, offering both support for “the Negro” and an oblique endorsement of segregation. It’s a moment that well represents Faulkner’s contradictions; he was a writer who posed formidable challenges to the South’s ethos, and yet he was also—in his pose a gentleman farmer and his devotion to tradition—a self-conscious representative of the region in all its stubbornness and fear of change. “We are living in a time of impossible revolutions,” wrote Sartre in 1939, “and Faulkner uses his extraordinary art to describe our suffocation and a world dying of old age.”
Whether you agree with this critical assessment or not, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees that Faulkner’s was an “extraordinary art.” The “Faulkner at Virginia” audio archive gives us an opportunity to get to know the man behind it, with all his self-effacing good humor, plainspoken wisdom, and, yes, Southern charm.
If you’re new to Faulkner and wondering which novel to start with, take Faulkner’s advice below. (The answer, in short, is Sartoris.) And if you want to know what book Faulkner considered his best, click here.
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